CHAPTEK XXII * 



REASONING. 



We talk of man being the rational animal ; and the tra- 

 ditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great 

 point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. 

 Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is 

 meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process 

 called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which 

 may lead to similar results. 



Much of our thinking consists of trains of images sug- 

 gested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of 

 which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should 

 be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to 

 rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical. The 

 links between the terms are either ' contiguity ' or ' similar- 

 ity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hard- 

 ly be very incoherent. As a rule, in this sort of irrespon- 

 sible thinking, the terms which fall to be coupled together 

 are empirical concretes, not abstractions. A sunset may 

 call up the vessel's deck from which I saw one last summer, 

 the companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.; or 

 it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and 

 Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could 

 write, of the Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities 

 predominate, Ave have a prosaic mind ; if rare contiguities, 

 or similarities, have free pla}^, we call the person fanciful, 

 poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is of matters 

 taken in their entirety. Having been thinking ci' one, we 

 find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have 

 been lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract 



* The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the text, 

 originally appeared in an article entitled ' Brute and Human Intellect," in 

 the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xii. p. 236). 



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